Media expert explores history of media

— -- Sweeping histories of mass media are plentiful and tend toward a certain sameness: Spoken and written forms of communication evolved with humanity, and in each era it seemed the new ways (what today we term "technology") would obliterate the old ways, and yet it never seemed to work quite like that. Ho hum.

Is it possible that Roger Parry might break the mold of mediocre media monographs?

Parry is British, and he has been employed within the British media world for more than 30 years — in advertising, market research, public relations, radio programming, television programming, newspaper publishing and entertainment. The breadth of his experience informs his grand tour of communications nicely.

Throughout Parry's guided tour, it is useful to remember that the word "media" is actually shorthand for "mediated content." The "media" tend to deliver information not readily available via direct experience.

While trying to explain the newness of mediated content circa 2011, Parry decided to follow the maxim followed by so many previous authors: The past is prologue. "It became clear to me that looking back at the history of media can provide real insights into its future," Parry says.

He first felt the urge to explain the past of media in order to understand the future a few years ago, relaxing in a Palo Alto, Calif., coffee shop. While composing an article "trying to make sense of the economic hurricane blowing through the media industry, uprooting established structures and destroying traditional organizations," Parry realized that in many ways the Palo Alto environs had served as the eye of the storm.

After all, Google had established its first office nearby. So had Facebook and Apple. Some of the intellectual power for all those innovative companies had been developed at nearby Stanford University. Graduates ended up in nearby Silicon Valley as technologists or on nearby Sand Hill Road as venture capitalists. "It was an environment that encouraged the collision of ideas between software, engineering and finance," Parry comments.

So Palo Alto was a center of something new — and not new. "The equivalent of the dot-com boom and bust has happened many times before," Parry the media historian realized as his research progressed. One example of many: "The vacuum tube, electromagnetic waves and recorded sound enabled radio in the 1920s."

Each so-called media revolution led to radical change within existing media, created confusion, and seemed to signal the end of the world as we knew it. And yet both developers and recipients of mediated content seemed to survive across generations. Parry presents the history not so much chronologically as by category, analyzing the technology, politics and economics shaping each of what he describes as "the 16 main media types." They are, in Parry's order of presentation: theater, books, pictures, posters, postal systems, newspapers, magazines, comics, telegraph, telephone, recorded sound, radio, cinema, television, video games and the Web.

Parry's laundry list approach can feel wearing if the book is read in large chunks. One media type per day over 16 days is perhaps the ideal pace for the casual reader wanting to partake of Parry's vast research. Nothing about Parry's predictions for the future of media feels earth-shattering. But the knowledge of the journey so far is fulfilling.